


Nothing In His Life Became Him Like The Leaving It

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24118168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: For the 100fandoms prompt: bottle. Polo's past flashes before him as his friends think about what they could have done differently.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	Nothing In His Life Became Him Like The Leaving It

He’d often heard that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes.

As Polo falls, he sees the nights he’d often spent with Guzman and Ander, sitting up all night playing video games then collapsing into bed, woken up by Guzman’s mother the next morning feeling like they only just went to sleep, which, let’s face it, they probably had.

He sees Marina too, getting up in the night to shout at them all because their talking was keeping her awake, dancing on that home video Guzman had, falling to the floor in front of him as he slowly realised what he had done.

He sees Cayetana, and Valerio, the people who had remained by his side when no one else would. And he sees Carla, all the time they spent together, some with Christian, some on double dates with Guzman and Lu, more time alone together.

Polo had been going to come clean the next day, to pay for his crime. Now he’s paying in a different way to that which he had imagined.

Guzman, Ander, Cayetana, Valerio, Carla. Those are the faces he will take with him now.

Guzman too thinks of those days; but he also remembers those days of uncertainty, the days when he really didn’t want to turn his back on all those years of history, determined to cling on to his friendship with Polo even as Samuel’s story slowly began to make a horrible kind of sense to him.

Once it had finally become clear to him that Samuel was right, that his sister really had been killed by one of his best friends, Guzman had pictured this moment, or variations on the theme, so many times, Polo slumped dead at his feet. Why should Polo get a future when he had taken Marina’s chance at a future away from her? Had Samuel not stopped him that day when he’d lured Polo back to his house, intent on securing a confession from him, that may well have been the way things had gone down.

Polo had taken so much from Guzman; his sister, that time he could have spent with Ander when he first got sick, his whole final year at Las Encinas ruined before he made the conscious decision to stop letting the guy take up 24/7 headspace. It had been easy to say in the moment, at the graduation party, that Guzman would never forgive Polo. At that point, it was just an abstract idea that he didn’t have to dwell on, because in his head at that time, it was something that was going to happen at some far off point in the future, at a time when he would have been able to go for ages without thinking of Polo, and then Ander or someone would mention that Polo had been released, and all of a sudden would become real to him again. Maybe by that time Polo really would have become nothing to him, just like he was trying to convince himself just as much as Samuel that that was already the case.

Then faced with Polo lying at his feet, knowing that he was no longer going to get that luxury of time, he was able to forgive him, to let Polo go in peace.

Guzman would always do anything for those he considered friends. Now he can do that one last thing for Polo.

Cayetana may not have been the person who wielded the broken bottle, but she sure as hell killed him anyway.

If she hadn’t created that stupid fake account on Twitter and tweeted the London school pretending to be Polo, maybe by now he’d have been over there in London, making that fresh start he’d been so desperate for. He’d still be alive to enjoy the future she had deprived him of.

Instead, she’d sent the tweets, determined to keep him there with her, choosing to ignore the fact that getting away from Spain was clearly what he wanted, what he needed, even if that future did not involve Cayetana. And maybe there was a small part of anger in there, anger about the fact that she had been the one to save him by rescuing him from the swimming pool, she had been the one to retrieve the trophy from the lake so it couldn’t be used to charge him with Marina’s murder, and yet there he was quite happy to end their relationship without a backward glance.

He could say all he liked that he had realised that their relationship didn’t work without Valerio, but Cayetana knew that the real issue wasn’t Valerio at all, but Carla. If it had been Lu or Nadia who had been given the drugs, would Polo have reacted in the same way, kicking Valerio out, then turning on him in the middle of school without even having got the full facts and found out it wasn’t even Valerio who had sold Carla the drugs at Yeray’s party? Cayetana didn’t think so.

She’d accepted that Polo was never going to love her in the way that she’d wanted him to. But she’d never wanted to kill him for it.

And yet in a way that was exactly what she had done.

Carla has gone back and forth over everything that had happened, wondering if there was anything she could have done differently to have changed the outcome. Would Polo have gone after Marina and confronted her about the watch if Carla hadn’t broken up with him for cheating with Christian? Honestly, she has to admit that yes, she thinks he probably would have done. That was one thing she could say about Polo; he would have done anything for her.

If Carla had stuck to her testimony, would Polo have actually gone to prison? Since Cayetana had stolen the statue, Carla can’t say for certain; it’s possible that the absence of the statue would have weakened the case against him and he would have come back to the school anyway. But it’s also possible that he would have been found guilty, that he’d have ended up going to prison. Would he have been any safer there? Again, Carla can never know for certain; for all she knows Nano may have still had some friends inside who could have got to him, or maybe Polo would have crossed with someone else altogether; Carla will never know, but she does know that there’s at least a chance that if Polo had gone to prison, he might have been still alive today. Carla had thought she was saving him; now she realises she may have done the exact opposite.

There’s no more she can do for Polo now; but she can save Lu. She knows that’s what Polo would have wanted.

It was easier for Ander to say in the moment that he hated Polo, that he blamed him for the fact that he got sick, because he didn’t want to focus on his own actions, that there had been so many times when he could have gone to Guzman, or to Samuel, even to his mother, Omar or the police, and told them what Polo had confessed to him, and yet he had been unable to do it.

Guzman had forgiven him, said that the two things weren’t connected and that wasn’t what caused his illness, and Omar had said that anyone else might have reacted the same way at the time. But knowing the others didn’t blame him didn’t make it any easier for him to stop blaming himself. If Polo hadn’t put him in that position where he was forced to lie to one of his best friends to protect the other, or the position where he had cheated on his boyfriend, then maybe things would be better right now.

Yet at the same time as Ander felt he hated Polo, there was a part of him that still loved him, that clung to the memories of the Polo who had hung out with him while he was undergoing chemo, who had treated him like the same old Ander he’d always known, who had done exactly what Ander needed in the moment. And just as he knew without being told that Guzman was also doing, he thought back over the years the three of them had been inseparable as kids.

He’d thought it was the right thing to do to try and take the blame himself. Lu had a future, and an even better one than she thought now she knew the scholarship had been reinstated. What did Ander have to look forward to, what difference did it make if he spent his last days in prison? But Omar was right; confessing could well make things worse for everyone involved, it would be better for Lu if he stuck to the original plan.

Omar hadn’t really known Polo. Although he’d hung out with some of Ander’s friends from Las Encinas, Polo was someone he’d never really spent a lot of time with. But Samuel has been his best friend since they were kids, and Omar knows what it was doing to him knowing that Marina’s murderer was walking the same corridors as him. He’s never been as close to Nano as he is to Samuel, but he still considers the guy a friend, someone he’s known for most of his life, and Polo was the one responsible for his incarceration, the reason why he is now on the run.

And he’d hated Polo for what he had put Ander through, forcing Ander to carry the knowledge of Polo’s crime, driving the wedge between Ander and Guzman at the moment Ander needed his best friend the most. Omar knows that this hadn’t caused Ander’s illness, and he’s tried to tell him that just as Guzman has, but he knows that Ander genuinely believed it, that he’s been carrying that around with him, and Omar won’t lie, there have been times when he could have quite happily punched the guy for that.

Now he knows Guzman better, he admires the way he will do anything for his friends, realises there is so much more to him than the obnoxious ass he’d first thought he was, and Lu had been one of the first of the group to make him feel welcome. So he doesn’t think twice about agreeing to help them.

Omar thinks back to when Nadia first found out Ander was sick, and how she had told him she considers him family. As he places his fingerprints on the bottle neck, he wonders when exactly these guys became his family.

He’s doing this for Marina, Samuel thinks as he places his hands on the broken bottle, as he claims to have seen Valerio having followed Polo into the bathroom. And he’s doing this for Nano. Too many lives had been ruined by Polo already; they had all been through enough. This was the only way.

Samuel’s often thought about this moment, although in the early days he’d imagined it more where Polo went to prison, or at least somewhere that he didn’t have to see him every day. That day when Samuel had had to step in with Guzman, that had been more about saving Guzman from having to live every day with the knowledge of having taken someone’s life. In that moment, he hadn’t thought about the fact that this must have been what Polo was having to deal with every day of his life too.

Funny, Samuel thinks, he was thinking mere hours ago about getting Rebe’s contacts to rough Polo up. Now this has happened, it doesn’t actually feel as good as he’d thought it might.

It’s not entirely true that Lu and Polo were never friends. Okay, so they didn’t tend to hang out together one on one, but since Lu used to date Polo’s best friend, and Polo had dated hers, they did spend quite a lot of time together. They had been friends, in their own way.

When Valerio had found out what Polo had said to Lu, he’d apologised to her, said that if he hadn’t told Polo in the first place about their father cutting her off then maybe he wouldn’t have said what he did. Maybe that was true, but equally it would have happened differently had Lu not been carrying the bottle, had she not already been upset about the scholarship that she’s now found out Polo got reinstated for her, had he decided to forgo the party and tell her in person somewhere else the next day…so many things could have changed the outcome. 

Lu looks around at all these people who have put their fingerprints on the bottle for her; there’s Guzman and Nadia who she had screwed over when she posted that sex tape online, Cayetana who she had trashed in that speech in front of everyone at the fundraiser, Samuel who she had referred to as “a different species” when being questioned about Marina’s murder, Carla who she hadn’t been there for enough when Carla needed her best friend. Any one of these people had more than enough reason to hate her, and yet all of them had pulled together to help her now.

When Polo had first made that comment to Lu about how no one had loved her, in the moment she had believed he was right, and that had been why she’d lashed out at him as she did. But watching the faces of her friends, old and new, and seeing what they were willing to do for her, Lu now understands that he is wrong, that she has people who love her after all.

She just wishes she had known that while Polo was still here.


End file.
